The two poems by William Blake, "The Nurse's Song" and "The School-Boy," are each reminiscences as the poet looks back to his childhood and to the innocence of that time. He necessarily is looking back from his present age, a period when he is more experienced and in need of a return to the simpler times of his youth. Yet, in looking back he does so in a way that shows how experience colors innocence, much as his memories are now tempered by the realization he has gained of what is to come for the child he once was. In both poems, Blake uses images of nature and organic life to evoke an image of human life as something that grows and develops and also as something that withers and dies, indicating a complete life cycle that is as circular in its way as his memories curve back to an earlier time and then connect with his present.
"The School-Boy" evokes an image of carefree youth in summer right at the beginning of the poem:
And the sky-lark sings with me (1-3).
In this poem, the speaker identifies with the school-boy living in his time and reacting to his youthful life:
But to go to school in a summer morn,
Yet this speaker is an older man, for he talks of how "the little ones spend the day" (8), while he tells the reader that he (the poet) spends that time sitting and reading, unable to take delight in what he reads because he is thinking always of what the young are losing as they trudge off to school. The poet sees the child as being separated from nature, and he makes this clear through a comparison of the school-boy to a bird in a cage:
How can the bird that is born for joy,
And forget his youthful spring (13-17).
Organic imagery is used throughout to refer to children--they are "buds" who lose their "blossoms." They are "tender plants" that have their joy stripped away. They should grow so that "the summer fruits appear," but what happens is that grief and care destroys much of their power, leaving...